The greatest thing about any movie festival is the amount of talent waiting to be discovered and absorbed. One such find at the ongoing Jio MAMI Mumbai film festival is Ektara Collective’s Turup (Checkmate). The film has been created and crafted by an independent group, Ektara Collective, which focuses on making cinema content realistic and people-oriented. Using the game of chess as the central metaphor to comment upon the social and political injustice, faced by the common man of the society the film brilliants comment upon the issues any filmmaker, veteran or new, tends to avoid.
The film story revolves around Chakki Chauraha in Bhopal, and its residents that range from a rising Hindutva leader Tiwari, to a Dalit sweeper Lat and an upper-class journalist married to a rich businessman. Each character has his or her own issues and how their fears and insecurities culminate, is the beautiful story of the film. The backdrop of such deep-rooted narrative is a local Chess tournament and how every character comes and goes, and fits in there, makes for an engaging and emotional watch.
The film talks about class divide, religious tensions, love-jihad, patriarchy, issue of contraception and companionship, all in one diverse bouquet and just the way it exists in the society. Ektara Collective used locals from the real locations and trained them to act in the film, adding to the authenticity and narrative. The film’s real gem is Monica, a real-life house help, who plays the fairy godmother in the entire story and helps evade a potential communal tension with her touch of wisdom and love. The way she checkmates the ever-agitated Hindutva rising is commendable and heartwarming.
The way half of the characters are just focused on the game and nothing else, despite fringe activists trying their best to invoke ‘Hindutva’ feeling is what the real stare of the country is right now. The people in whose name the entire barrel is fought, has no care if a Hindu marries a Muslim or if a Dalit woman wants to run her family in her terms, it’s always just the ‘few’ who try and impose their ideology to make the country great for their daughters, while themselves patronizing and mistreating them. The film is full of symbolic representations that make you stand and salute the creative minds behind the brilliant film. Turup’s real asset is its cast and especially the women representation and thinking.
As members of Ektara Collective put it, “Cinema has always been a medium to project socialist ideologies and it would be great if it’s left that way. The claws of capitalism ruin the meaning and motive of cinema.”
Turup’s existence proves that art never can or should be apolitical. Cinema is a reflection of the society we are living in today and that is diversified and
polarized to an extent that a single spark can lead up to riots that last for weeks and even months. The ‘select few’ have not even spared love from religious bigotry and has forced a section to live in fear and resentment in every way possible. This commendable effort by Ektara Collective, to make filmmaking democratic – by the people, for the people, and from the people- is what the industry deserves but will never appreciate or accept because of that constant fear of getting silenced and even attacked. It's a long road ahead for the Collective to make this socialist form of filmmaking acceptable amidst the glitz and glamour of show business.
A gem in every way possible, Turup is definitely an underdog of the festival and highlights the issues that need to be talked about without coming across as a propaganda. A benchmark for all the aspiring filmmakers, indeed.
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